Factual

Expect Labs has been on a bit of a tear lately — within the past six months the San Francisco-based startup showed off its fan-favorite app at Disrupt SF 2012, scored itself $2.4 million in funding from some big names, and inked a deal with the voice recognition mavens at Nuance. Now Expect Labs has tapped big data startup Factual Inc. and its sizable store of location data in a bid to… Read More

Factual is a company that provides open data sets for developers, most notably its location data sets and APIs. The company just announced that it has added thousands of new locations to its U.S. point of interest sets, for a total of over 22 million places in the U.S and 62 million places around the world. Read More

In the quest for a unified database of places, geo-location startup Factual is making big strides. Today it is announcing a major partnership with SimpleGeo to maintain and power its places database, which up until now has offered a competing database of places in the eyes of developers.
The merged database will have 30 million places, and be maintained and updated by Factual. Developers will… Read More

With a fresh infusion of $4 million from Comcast Interactive Capital, which it raised recently in a series B financing (with previous investor BlueRun also pitching in), hyperlocal places database Fwix is pushing out a major upgrade to its developer API today. Fwix is creating an open database of places in partnership with Factual . Developers will be able to pull data about millions of… Read More

Spend enough time in Silicon Valley, and of all the buzz words you’ll hear neatly tucked in with “graph,” “serendipity,” and “personalization” is one often uttered though, on the whole, not yet fully understood: “Big Data.” On the surface, everyone realizes the opportunity. Data is being generated at lightning speed, the cost of storing… Read More

When Twitter bought Mixer Labs in December, 2009, it inherited the startup’s then-recently launched GeoAPI, which offered a platform for building geo apps. The GeoAPI combined a places database of 16 million businesses with a reverse-geo-coder and support for geo-coded Tweets, Flickr photos, and even an iPhone SDK. Twitter kept the GeoAPI going after the acquisition—but that ends… Read More

One of my big predictions for 2011 is that we are going to start to see open databases for places spring up and take hold. Hyperpublic, which just launched today, is doing just that by creating an open database of people, places, and things tied to specific locations. “We are trying to structure the data in your local world,” says CEO and founder Jordan Cooper, who is also a… Read More

Factual, the open database company, closed a $25 million series A financing, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures. VCs Ben Horowitz of AH and Danny Rimer of Index will be joining Factual’s board. Ron Conway’s SV Angel and former Hollywood agent Michael Ovitz also invested, as did some of the previous angels who put in about $2 million earlier this year (only half of… Read More

Big Data is great for geeks, but most normal people don’t get a kick out of looking at huge tables of data (Excel junkies excluded). Factual, which is an open database wiki, just added some tools to help visualize the data entered on the site.
Every table now has a “visualizations” tab which lets anyone who publishes a set of data an easy way to turn that data into graphs… Read More

If you co-founded the company that became Google AdSense, as Gil Elbaz did with Applied Semantics, you don’t have any problem finding investors when you want to start a new venture. Elbaz sold Applied Semantics to Google for $100 million in 2003, and launched his latest startup, Factual, last October. He doesn’t really need the money, but so many all-star investors were clamoring… Read More

Gil Elbaz wants people to make lots of spreadsheet tables filled with fun and important facts and share them across the Web. Later today, he will be launching Factual, which he describes as “a platform for anyone to share and mash open data.”
Elbaz previously was the co-founder of Applied Semantics, which Google bought in 2003 for $100 million and turned its technology into AdSense. Read More